A Tunisian academic and politician, he was born on the outskirts of the capital in 1958. He worked as a professor of constitutional law in Tunisian universities. In October 2019, he entered the political competition and was elected president of the country.
Kais Saied, a university professor of constitutional law, is the fourth president of Tunisia after the Jasmine Revolution, which erupted in 2011, and he is the seventh president of the Tunisian Republic since its proclamation on July 25, 1957.
Birth and upbringing
Tunisian President Kais Saied was born on February 22, 1958 in the city of Ariana in the Greater Tunis Governorate of a middle-class family.
His father, Moncef Said, worked as a government employee, and his mother, Zakia Balagha, took care of the affairs of the house. His family roots go back to the city of Bani Khiar, which administratively belongs to the governorate of Nabeul (northeast of Tunisia), from which his family’s ancestors moved to the capital for decades.
He spent only months as a baby in Ariana, then his family moved to Rades, and there he spent his childhood and studied the primary stage, and after that the family moved to Tunis, where he studied secondary school at the Bab Al-Khadra Institute and the Ibn Sharaf Institute, then Al-Sadiqiah School, from which he obtained the high school in Arts Division.
He studied university at the Faculty of Law in Tunis, and his initial desire was to study Arabic literature or philosophy, but his father asked him to study law, an approach which he says in an interview with Tunisian Radio in March 2017, that he did not regret it.
Qais Said is a father of 3 children (two girls and a son: Sarah, Mona and Omar), and he is married to the Judge Counsellor at the Court of Appeal Ashraf Shebeil, the daughter of Judge Mohamed Shebeil, and he met her when she was a student at the Faculty of Law in Sousse, where he was a professor.
Study and training
He received his primary education in the schools of the capital, Tunis, and completed secondary school at the Sadiqiyah School, in which many Tunisian presidents studied, to go to the Faculty of Law and Political Science in Tunis and obtain in 1985 a graduate degree in international law, then a diploma from the International Academy of Constitutional Law in 1986, At the age of 28, then a certificate from the International Institute of Humanitarian Law in San Remo, Italy.
He worked as a law teacher at the Faculty of Law and Political Science in the governorate of Sousse from 1986 to 1999, and during this period, for a short period, he supervised the Department of Public Law.
After this professional experience, he moved to teach at the Faculty of Legal, Political and Social Sciences in Tunis with the rank of assistant professor in the subjects of constitutional law and political system, from 1999 until 2018, when he retired at the age of 60.
intellectual and political orientation
Following the fall of the Zine El Abidine Ben Ali regime on January 14, 2011 and the beginning of the new political movement in Tunisia, Saied chose the opposition site and the boycotts for most of the electoral benefits, without expressing or declaring his support or even his ideological rapprochement with any political party in the Tunisian scene that followed. revolution.
On several occasions, Qais Saeed expressed a special and different conception of the state and the organization of power, as he sees no benefit from political parties, and calls for reducing their control over political life in the country.
In 2011, he called for a boycott of the elections for the National Constituent Assembly, which he considered "to circumvent the revolution and robbed the popular will, which was implemented by political parties according to the logic of quotas and disputes that resulted in an electoral law based on voting on electoral lists," accusing foreign forces of being behind the determination of the electoral process in Tunisia.
In 2013, during the public debate on the constitution, he published a document entitled “For a New Establishment.” Thus, the concept of what he called “basic democratic construction” became the main idea he presented in his 2019 election campaign, which is based on the principle of what he called the “inverted pyramid.” .
According to this document, Said defined the features of his political project for Tunisia, which makes the local councils the top of the inverted pyramid, and their members are elected by direct vote, and 24 regional councils emerge from them over the number of Tunisia’s governorates, and each regional council consists of a representative from each municipality, to be the parliament or The People's National Assembly is at the bottom of the hierarchy and its members emanate from the local councils.
The Tunisian president adopts the idea of voting for people instead of party lists, arguing that the people's deputy who runs according to the party list system owes allegiance to the party he supports.
He believes that the correct thing is loyalty to the people who voted for him, and therefore it is logical to find the appropriate legal mechanisms to withdraw this agency or delegation in the event that the people consider that the representative has neglected his mission.
Following the entry into force of the Tunisian Constitution of 2014, Saied expressed his reservations about some of the "formal imbalances that marred it", and expected the emergence of many loopholes in the future, including, for example, those related to the transitional provisions of institutions and the setting of electoral dates.
With the announcement of the dates of the legislative and presidential elections in Tunisia for the year 2014, he did not hesitate to announce a boycott, describing the parties as political bankruptcy, and opposing the principle of voting on party lists.
political experience
From 2011 to 2014, Qais Saeed made himself an image of a public figure different from the ordinary, helped by his frequent presence in the international and Tunisian media - both governmental and private - which adopted him as a scientific reference to which he resorted whenever the controversy and disagreement raged over the drafting of the new constitution, and then from 2014 to 2019 To express his positions on the Tunisian political scene.
On the fifth of September 2018, he announced his candidacy for the presidential elections, which made the "Professor" - as his supporters like to call him - attract to him a significant proportion of young people dreaming of "radical change", after he found in his speech a different soul from those who preceded him to the reins of government before and after revolution.
He was also helped by his non-affiliation to a political party and his descent from a social environment close to the middle and toiling class, especially since he lived for years in the Mnihla area, which is one of the popular areas on the outskirts of Tunis.
On September 15, 2019, he topped the results of the first round of the Tunisian presidential elections with 18.4% of the vote, ahead of Tunisian businessman Nabil Karoui, who received 15.6% of the vote.
happy president
Qais Saeed ran for the second round of the presidential elections on October 13, 2019 as an independent candidate supported by groups of students and volunteers with capabilities that seemed limited through what was circulated on social networking sites. realizing his dreams.
He won by more than 76%, 90% of whom were in the age group between 18 and 25 years, and 84% between 26 and 44 years old, according to an opinion poll conducted by the Sigma Konsai Foundation, while his opponent, Nabil Karoui, received 23.1% of the vote, according to an opinion poll conducted by the Sigma Konsai Foundation. Statement issued by the Independent High Authority for Elections on Thursday, October 17, 2019.
On Wednesday, October 23, 2019, he was sworn in as the seventh president of Tunisia, and the process of appointing prime ministers since he assumed the presidency has witnessed many vibrations that began to suggest difficult beginnings.
On January 10, 2020, the House of Representatives refused to grant confidence to Habib Jemli, the candidate of the Ennahda movement whom Said assigned to form the government, and this was followed by the resignation of Elias Fakhfakh on July 15, 2020 on the background of accusations of conflict of interest, and then Hisham al-Mashishi was dismissed by the president. On July 25, 2021.
On July 25, 2021, Kais Saied announced the dismissal of Al-Mashishi, the dismissal of the government, the freezing of parliament, the lifting of immunity from the deputies, and the accountability of corrupt members of them, relying on Article 80 of the Tunisian Constitution, measures that his critics considered a "coup against democracy" and "a tendency to individual rule", in When his supporters considered them "necessary steps to correct the course of the revolution and fight corruption."
Najla Boden was appointed Prime Minister on September 29, 2021, and on December 13, 2021 he announced a roadmap to organize an electronic consultation, followed by a popular referendum on the constitution, and then organizing legislative elections in December 2022, after which the exceptional measures that Announced July 25, 2021.
On February 6, 2022, he ordered the dissolution of the Supreme Judicial Council, explaining that it had deviated from serving the public interest, and then on March 7, 2022 he appointed a new Judicial Council, and granted itself the power to dismiss judges.
Saeed announced the final dissolution of Parliament on March 30, 2022, hours after Parliament approved in a hypothetical plenary session a law canceling the exceptional measures initiated by the President on July 25, 2021, and demanded the judiciary to take the necessary legal measures, and considered that session a “coup against the legitimacy.”
On April 22, 2022, he issued a decree dissolving the Independent High Authority for Elections, an elected body, and specifying its new composition and terms of membership.
The new body organized a referendum on the new constitution on July 25, 2022, and announced its adoption the following day by 94.6% of the voters, who made up only 27.54% of the total voters supposed to participate in the referendum.
Awards and Honors
On June 16, 2021, Qais Saeed was awarded an honorary doctorate in scientific research from the Italian University of La Sapienza.
Tasks and functions
Between 1989 and 1990, Qais Saeed assumed the duties of the rapporteur of the two special committees at the General Secretariat of the League of Arab States in order to prepare for the amendment of the draft charter of the League and the draft statute of the Arab Court of Justice.
He worked as a cooperating expert with the Arab Institute for Human Rights from 1993 to 1995.
He served as the Secretary General of the Tunisian Association of Constitutional Law from 1990 to 1995, and then as its vice president since 1995.
Member of the Scientific Council of the International Academy of Constitutional Law and member of its Board of Directors since 1997.
He headed the Tunis Center for Constitutional Law for Democracy, which was established in 2011.
literature
Kais Saied authored the book "Tunisian Political Texts and Documents", with Abdel Fattah Omar (1987).
He has also published several articles and scientific studies in the fields of law and constitutional law since 1985, the most important of which are: "Relationships between the Republic of Tunisia and the World Bank Group (1985)", "Legal aspects of the Iraqi-Iranian conflict (1987)", "Freedom to practice religious rites in Tunisia ( 1989)”, “Constituency Monitoring of Laws in Tunisia (1993)”, “Constitutional Independence (2001)”, “Council of Councillors in Tunisia or the Law between Kasserine (2004)”, “Constituent Power under Occupation: The Case of Iraq and the Case of Afghanistan (2007)” ".